One lucky person will win that bike, and if you slip me a large-denomination bill (Euro or Canadian, no US$ please) I'll see if I can arrange it so that it's you. Just to warn you though, I am going to get sogirl drink drunk at this thing--obviously not on straight Jack Daniel's because eeew, but I'm definitely going to have at least five "Sex On My Faces." Or is it "Sexes On My Face?" I want to be grammatically correct before throwing them all up the following morning.

In other news, there is considerable hand-wringing in the cycling press about how to make the sport interesting to Americans again now that Lancey Pants is gone:

Americans are keyed to tune into series, little vignettes that each have the structure of a stage play: start, middle, and finish. And we decided somehow that the very best way to showcase our sport was to show them every minute, regardless of whether anything is happening or not. It was different when we had rock star Lance Armstrong with the celebrity few other sports had, who was articulate, brash, charismatic, and doing uber-confident “superman” feats. He was our spectacle and we enjoyed extraordinary attention during those fertile years. He even dated a real rock star with a no. 1 song. There were no boundaries to his media and mass appeal.

So, with Armstrong towing us along, we gathered some fans from the fringe. But he was the center of attention and there was a compelling reason for them to endure the hours of non-activity just to track this can’t-look-away athlete in progress. The crash on Luz Ardiden. The Beloki-field incident near Gap. It was Jesse Owens times a thousand — Lance defeated the dusty Euros at their own game. He embodied the new America: strong, broad-shouldered, aggressive, and confident. Compelling. Americans love a great story.

So what's the answer? Possibly less live race coverage and more pre-packaged post-race programming:

Packaged: Not live, where the story is told by the outcome, extrapolating the best of the best material that matters from the inside-out, expanding our dramatic revelations beyond just the road, and exploiting our real-world racing dramas that are rarely seen. All this carefully bound and presented into a freshly baked genre for us: reality sports drama TV. Cycling is made for just this treatment!

Right, whatever. Let's face it: the sport is finished in this country, and the sooner everybody acknowledges there's no way to jump-start the American public into giving a crap about professional cycling again the better. Sure, we're a nation of idiots, but we're not so stupid that some creative editing is going to trick football and baseball fans into staying in their well-worn sofa ass grooves to watch bike racing too. As the op-ed points out, the "U.S. carries more cycling hours than any country in the world," so finally dropping all this coverage will free up precious airtime for more culturally relevant sporting fare such as rodeo riding and Babe Winkelman blasting the fuck out of animals, and the handful of American Freds who do actually want to watch this stuff can just see it on the Internet or at the Rapha café.

if i ever lose a leg, that's the contraption i want to use. now he just has to figure out a way to use the chain, add an electric assist, and you have a new sport to replace the already dead cycling cycle biking sport.

In that Opel video, at about 0:57, the guy with the flat-brimmed hat (Francois?) riding caught my eye: his bike only has a handlebar on one side of the stem! It appears that he has no left arm. That'd be quite a surprise for a bike thief.

The only was to jump-start cycling viewing in America to to start an "anything goes" cycling league. If all the rider were doped to the same level, the best riders would still win. The only difference would be that they'd be flying down the road at 35 mph, all day, and climbing at 20 mph.The first commissioner of this league could be Armstrong. He could check to see if everyone was doing it right.

How I know that competitive competition bike bicycling championship races don't even want to be on mainstream television: they were going to have the cx world cup on the same day as the NFL superbowl. This is how you keep it authentic, hip and underground. Not popular and widely known.

OK, I was all ready to laugh at that stunt trike thing, but then got to the last line of the kickstarter page: "Finally, Joe Hadzicki, (my dad), has over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience running his company, Revolution Enterprises (http://www.revkites.com/), and knows all about production, quality control, shipping, etc... "For those who don't know Revolution Kites are AMAZING! They are one of the best and most unique stunt kites available, I really can't say enough good stuff about them. There is also a segment of stunt kiting that has been using something similar to the trike paired with a kite that has a lot of pull (think kite surfing on land) since the late 1980's. This idea might not be as silly as it first appears... -NYCHighwheeler

Also says insane stuff about heavy breathing people producing more CO2 than a internal combustion engine. Which implies that air contains more carbon than oil. I hadn't realised that global warming had got that bad.

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About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!